Under the Big Top

Circus Posters from Princeton University Library and the Library of Congress

American small towns circa 1900, whether they are viewed as cozy and homey nests of family life or as bleak Main Streets peopled by philistines, were indisputably colorless. They were dusty in the summer, blanketed by snow in the winter; the only relief was a red-brick courthouse or an occasional flower garden. Except for a few days every summer.

When the circus came to town, it was heralded (the week or so before) by gaudy, vibrant posters that plastered every fence and wall with roaring lions, elegant ringmasters in top hats, death-defying tightrope walkers and capering clowns—all in the brightest shades of red, blue, green and yellow.

In those days before movies, radio and the widespread use of telephones, there were very few ways of capturing people’s attention about upcoming events. Two weeks before one of the big circuses was to appear in a town, the advance train puffed into the station. It was loaded with bill posters; banner men, who hung cloth banners on tall buildings; lithographers, who decorated store windows with posters; and programmers, who distributed handbills, as well as thousands of sheets of posters. In the case of one large circus, the advance train traveled with around 914,000 sheets of paper, which worked out to be about 627 posters per town. Sometimes, if a rival circus was scheduled to show up a few weeks later, its posters would be papered over the first circus’s announcements. No wonder a town sang with color when the circus was coming.

The circus poster business was a big one, both for the circuses and for the printers that supplied the artwork. In their heyday, between 1880 and 1930, a circus spent most of its budget on advertising, while producing circus posters was one of the principal sources of income for the printing industry.

Even the earliest incarnations of the circus were announced with bills. A Mr. Poole advertised his 1786 show with printed materials, and in 1793 a man named John Bill Rickets produced the first full circus in America, distributing printed bills to bring in audiences. Just four decades later, in 1833, circuses were using large posters, seven or eight feet in length, to advertise their presence. As early as 1847, color printing, using wood blocks inked with different colors, had become a staple of the poster business, and by 1872 P. T. Barnum, arguably the greatest showman of all time, advertised his traveling circus with giant color posters.

In Europe, around the same time as circuses in the United States started appearing, an innovation occurred in printing that was to have a major impact on how posters were made. Lithography, the process of printing an image that had been drawn on stone, was developed in the late 18th century. Employed to some extent by a handful of firms from the 1840s onward, it was not used for printing circus posters until the 1870s. When it became the standard method of printing, lithography defined the basic unit for a poster, which was known as a sheet. A sheet was a piece of paper 28 inches by 42 inches on which an image was imposed. The dimensions approximated the size of a lithographer’s stone that a man could handle easily. From the 1870s on, nearly all circus posters were printed in fractions or multiples of a sheet: A half sheet (often used for window posters) was 28 inches by 21 inches; a two sheet was 42 inches by 56 inches; and a three sheet was 42 inches by 84 inches. Large posters, displayed in parades, used as many as 32 sheets. The Strobridge Lithographing Company, one of the big circus printers, produced as many as two and a half million posters every year through the 1870s. The business grew steadily in the following years and was fulfilling orders in the millions for some clients. In 1911 the Barnum & Bailey Circus commissioned from Strobridge’s salesman A. A. Stewart 34 sizes and designs, including 2,000 copies of a 32-sheet parade poster and 5,000 one sheets to pass out during the parades—altogether, 121,600 posters that totaled 1,474,800 sheets.

These enormous orders, as well as more modest ones for smaller operations, were printed during the winter and then sold to the circuses, which paid for them as they were used over the summer—a system that made the circus and the printer even more interdependent. Most circus lithographs were printed in four or five colors, using a separate lithographer’s stone for each color. Often, circuses chose their posters from the printer’s stock images—lions, elephants, clowns, acrobats, bareback riders—and the outfit’s name was simply added. The printer then made separate small sheets naming towns and dates in bold colors that could be attached to the images. Because each circus’s tour was carefully plotted to anticipate their rivals’ appearances, there was room for espionage, and the circus had to trust the printer to keep the date sheets, as they were called, confidential.

There were dozens of printing houses. Among the major ones were the Strobridge and Enquirer firms, of Cincinnati; Donaldson, of Newport, Kentucky; Riverside, of Milwaukee; Erie, of Erie, Pennsylvania; and Courier, of Buffalo, which served circuses ranging from small one-ring shows to the major organizations that have become mythic in the American memory.

The millions of posters that brought colorful life to towns across the nation for over 50 years were often saved and have been gathered in such institutions as the International Circus Hall of Fame in Peru, Indiana, where many circuses had their winter quarters; the Ringling Museum of the American Circus in Sarasota, Florida, where the Ringlings established winter quarters in 1927; and the Library of Congress, which holds more than 600 posters. The McCaddon Collection, at Princeton University’s library, with more than 400 posters, consists of the working papers of the Barnum & Bailey partnership prior to its merger with Ringling Bros. in 1907; the posters, correspondence, scrapbooks and costume and wagon designs were accumulated by Joseph T. McCaddon, who was business manager of the circus at the turn of the 20th century.

Jack Rennert, collector, author and auctioneer of posters for more than 40 years and the president of the International Poster Center in Manhattan, points out that “in most areas of poster art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America followed European design, mainly French creations. It was only in show posters—meaning posters that showed magic acts and circuses—that the United States led. When Buffalo Bill, Barnum & Bailey and the Ringlings took their shows to Europe with dynamic posters created by such firms as Strobridge and Enquirer, the Europeans learned from their designs.” Adds Rennert, “America would not be innovative again like this in poster art until the designs for rock bands in the 1960s.”